Another challenge to be faced by bioethics in the decades ahead is the downstream consequences of falling birth rates.

Once fertility begins to fall, it keeps falling to levels which once seemed (sorry) inconceivable. The replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. But in South Korea, parts of Spain, and Russia it has fallen below 1.3. At that rate, population begins to decline fairly rapidly. A small population could have big political consequences.This worries the leaders of Iran. The birth rate in Iran has fallen more swiftly than anywhere else in the world – from 6.4 in 1986 to a current low of 1.8. When they look into their crystal ball, they see a weak and depopulated nation.

This is why the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently released a 14-point plan to reverse decades of propaganda for small families and double his country’s population to 150 million. His proposals include: increasing the birth rate to more than 2.3; lowering the age of marriage; an Islamic-Iranian lifestyle and opposing undesirable aspects of the Western lifestyle; and providing treatment for both male and female infertility.

A bill is already being drafted to ban abortions and sterilisations. Government support for family planning and contraceptives has already been discontinued. A program offering free vasectomies has been terminated.

For Westerners like me, the social policy and politics of a theocratic country like Iran are quite mysterious. But if its rulers are as impatient and stubborn as the media makes them out to be, they may try to impose pro-natal policies, lest they drift into geopolitical irrelevance. Today most bioethics deals with issues relating to having fewer children. What happens when women are pressured into having more children? What dilemmas will bioethicists face then?

The Emerging Latino DivideBy DICK MORRISPublished on DickMorris.com on December 15, 2014Tear up the textbooks, a new pattern may be emerging among Latino voters. The conventional wisdom -- that Hispanics habitually vote Democrat over the immigration issue -- may be obsolete.

Gallup found that support for President Obama's amnesty order was primarily among the foreign born population -- whether Latino or not. Hispanics born in the United States only backed the amnesty plan by 51-42. Latinos born outside the U.S. backed it by 75-17. (Non-Hispanics born outside the U.S. backed Obama's plan by 60-32).

Since only one-quarter of Hispanic voters are foreign born, this finding is electrifying! It means that the knee jerk approval Democrats are expecting from the Latino community may not be forthcoming, particularly not in sufficient numbers to offset the backlash among non-Hispanic voters.

But the longer term political and social implications of this fissure in the Latino community, based on place of birth, are even more important. Political science experts have long wondered if the rapidly growing Latino population would auger in a permanent Democratic majority. When black and Latino voters reach one-third of the electorate combined (they are now one-quarter), will that cause Republican extinction?

Certainly if Hispanic voters follow African-American voting patterns it would spell bad -- and possibly fatal -- news for the GOP. But the Gallup data suggest that Latinos are assimilating politically into the larger population and, unlike blacks, abandoning race consciousness in their voting patterns. Like German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Irish-Americans, they are mirroring national public opinion in their thinking rather than sticking with their ethnic orientation.

This birthplace gap in the Latino vote may help explain the 13 point gain by Republicans among Latino voters in the 2014 elections. While Democrats still won Hispanics 2:1, they did not win by the 3:1 margin that Obama tallied in 2012.

For decades, politicians spoke of the gender gap in voting patterns before they realized that pro-Democratic voting patterns were largely concentrated among unmarried women. It was more of a marriage gap than a gender gap.

So, with outspoken Latino advocacy groups urging immigration amnesty at the top of their lungs, the compliant and complacent media have assumed that they speak for all Latinos. But they don't. While foreign-born Hispanics account for half of the U.S. Latino population, they are only one -quarter of the citizens and, perhaps, an even smaller share of the electorate.

So Republicans should not fear increases in the Latino population as much as they do. In the second generation, the children of our new neighbors, show the classical signs of healthy assimilation.

In recent weeks, we have been focusing on Greece, Germany, Ukraine and Russia. All are still burning issues. But in every case, readers have called my attention to what they see as an underlying and even defining dimension of all these issues — if not right now, then soon. That dimension is declining population and the impact it will have on all of these countries. The argument was made that declining populations will generate crises in these and other countries, undermining their economies and national power. Sometimes we need to pause and move away from immediate crises to broader issues. Let me start with some thoughts from my book The Next 100 Years.Reasons for the Population Decline

There is no question but that the populations of most European countries will decline in the next generation, and in the cases of Germany and Russia, the decline will be dramatic. In fact, the entire global population explosion is ending. In virtually all societies, from the poorest to the wealthiest, the birthrate among women has been declining. In order to maintain population stability, the birthrate must remain at 2.1 births per woman. Above that, and the population rises; below that, it falls. In the advanced industrial world, the birthrate is already substantially below 2.1. In middle-tier countries such as Mexico or Turkey, the birthrate is falling but will not reach 2.1 until between 2040 and 2050. In the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh or Bolivia, the birthrate is also falling, but it will take most of this century to reach 2.1.

The process is essentially irreversible. It is primarily a matter of urbanization. In agricultural and low-level industrial societies, children are a productive asset. Children can be put to work at the age of 6 doing agricultural work or simple workshop labor. Children become a source of income, and the more you have the better. Just as important, since there is no retirement plan other than family in such societies, a large family can more easily support parents in old age.

In a mature urban society, the economic value of children declines. In fact, children turn from instruments of production into objects of massive consumption. In urban industrial society, not only are the opportunities for employment at an early age diminished, but the educational requirements also expand dramatically. Children need to be supported much longer, sometimes into their mid-20s. Children cost a tremendous amount of money with limited return, if any, for parents. Thus, people have fewer children. Birth control merely provided the means for what was an economic necessity. For most people, a family of eight children would be a financial catastrophe. Therefore, women have two children or fewer, on average. As a result, the population contracts. Of course, there are other reasons for this decline, but urban industrialism is at the heart of it.

There are those who foresee economic disaster in this process. As someone who was raised in a world that saw the population explosion as leading to economic disaster, I would think that the end of the population boom would be greeted with celebration. But the argument is that the contraction of the population, particularly during the transitional period before the older generations die off, will leave a relatively small number of workers supporting a very large group of retirees, particularly as life expectancy in advanced industrial countries increases. In addition, the debts incurred by the older generation would be left to the smaller, younger generation to pay off. Given this, the expectation is major economic dislocation. (MARC: This makes sense to me) In addition, there is the view that a country's political power will contract with the population, based on the assumption that the military force that could be deployed — and paid for — with a smaller population would contract.

The most obvious solution to this problem is immigration. The problem is that Japan and most European countries have severe cultural problems integrating immigrants. The Japanese don't try, for the most part, and the Europeans who have tried — particularly with migrants from the Islamic world — have found it difficult. The United States also has a birthrate for white women at about 1.9, meaning that the Caucasian population is contracting, but the African-American and Hispanic populations compensate for that. In addition, the United States is an efficient manager of immigration, despite current controversies.

Two points must be made on immigration. First, the American solution of relying on immigration will mean a substantial change in what has been the historical sore point in American culture: race. The United States can maintain its population only if the white population becomes a minority in the long run. The second point is that some of the historical sources of immigration to the United States, particularly Mexico, are exporting fewer immigrants. As Mexico moves up the economic scale, emigration to the United States will decline. Therefore, the third tier of countries where there is still surplus population will have to be the source for immigrants. Europe and Japan have no viable model for integrating migrants.The Effects of Population on GDP

But the real question is whether a declining population matters. Assume that there is a smooth downward curve of population, with it decreasing by 20 percent. If the downward curve in gross domestic product matched the downward curve in population, per capita GDP would be unchanged. By this simplest measure, the only way there would be a problem is if GDP fell more than population, or fell completely out of sync with the population, creating negative and positive bubbles. That would be destabilizing.

But there is no reason to think that GDP would fall along with population. The capital base of society, its productive plant as broadly understood, will not dissolve as population declines. Moreover, assume that population fell but GDP fell less — or even grew. Per capita GDP would rise and, by that measure, the population would be more prosperous than before.

One of the key variables mitigating the problem of decreasing population would be continuing advances in technology to increase productivity. We can call this automation or robotics, but growths in individual working productivity have been occurring in all productive environments from the beginning of industrialization, and the rate of growth has been intensifying. Given the smooth and predictable decline in population, there is no reason to believe, at the very least, that GDP would not fall less than population. In other words, with a declining population in advanced industrial societies, even leaving immigration out as a factor, per capita GDP would be expected to grow.Changes in the Relationship Between Labor and Capital

A declining population would have another and more radical impact. World population was steady until the middle of the 16th century. The rate of growth increased in about 1750 and moved up steadily until the beginning of the 20th century, when it surged. Put another way, beginning with European imperialism and culminating in the 20th century, the population has always been growing. For the past 500 years or so, the population has grown at an increasing rate. That means that throughout the history of modern industrialism and capitalism, there has always been a surplus of labor. There has also been a shortage of capital in the sense that capital was more expensive than labor by equivalent quanta, and given the constant production of more humans, supply tended to depress the price of labor.

For the first time in 500 years, this situation is reversing itself. First, fewer humans are being born, which means the labor force will contract and the price of all sorts of labor will increase. This has never happened before in the history of industrial man. In the past, the scarce essential element has been capital. But now capital, understood in its precise meaning as the means of production, will be in surplus, while labor will be at a premium. The economic plant in place now and created over the next generation will not evaporate. At most, it is underutilized, and that means a decline in the return on capital. Put in terms of the analog, money, it means that we will be entering a period where money will be cheap and labor increasingly expensive.

The only circumstance in which this would not be the case would be a growth in productivity so vast that it would leave labor in surplus. Of course if that happened, then we would be entering a revolutionary situation in which the relationship between labor and income would have to shift. Assuming a more incremental, if intensifying, improvement in productivity, it would still leave surplus on the capital side and a shortage in labor, sufficient to force the price of money down and the price of labor up.

That would mean that in addition to rising per capita GDP, the actual distribution of wealth would shift. We are currently in a period where the accumulation of wealth has shifted dramatically into fewer hands, and the gap between the upper-middle class and the middle class has also widened. If the cost of money declined and the price of labor increased, the wide disparities would shift, and the historical logic of industrial capitalism would be, if not turned on its head, certainly reformulated.

We should also remember that the three inputs into production are land, labor and capital. The value of land, understood in the broader sense of real estate, has been moving in some relationship to population. With a decline in population, the demand for land would contract, lowering the cost of housing and further increasing the value of per capita GDP.

The path to rough equilibrium will be rocky and fraught with financial crisis. For example, the decline in the value of housing will put the net worth of the middle and upper classes at risk, while adjusting to a world where interest rates are perpetually lower than they were in the first era of capitalism would run counter to expectations and therefore lead financial markets down dark alleys. The mitigating element to this is that the decline in population is transparent and highly predictable. There is time for homeowners, investors and everyone else to adjust their expectations.

This will not be the case in all countries. The middle- and third-tier countries will be experiencing their declines after the advanced countries will have adjusted — a further cause of disequilibrium in the system. And countries such as Russia, where population is declining outside the context of a robust capital infrastructure, will see per capita GDP decline depending on the price of commodities like oil. Populations are falling even where advanced industrialism is not in place, and in areas where only urbanization and a decline of preindustrial agriculture are in place the consequences are severe. There are places with no safety net, and Russia is one of those places.

The argument I am making here is that population decline will significantly transform the functioning of economies, but in the advanced industrial world it will not represent a catastrophe — quite the contrary. Perhaps the most important change will be that where for the past 500 years bankers and financiers have held the upper hand, in a labor-scarce society having pools of labor to broker will be the key. I have no idea what that business model will look like, but I have no doubt that others will figure that out.

Japan is an excellent place to test the proposition that countries do better with low levels of immigration. In a land of 127 million people, there are just over two million foreign residents, and only a third of them are here for the long term. The number of illegal immigrants, which peaked at a modest 300,000 in the early 1990s, is down by 80%.

As for refugees, in 2016, Tokyo entertained 10,000 requests for asylum. It accepted a grand total of 28. Steve Bannon would smile.

The result, say immigration restrictionists, is plain to see. Japan’s crime and drug-use rates are famously low. Life expectancy is famously high. Japanese students put their American peers to shame on international tests. The unemployment rate clocks in at 3.1%. All this is supposed to be a function of a homogenous society with a high degree of cultural cohesion—the antithesis of cacophonous, multiethnic America.

Just one problem: The Japanese have lost their appetite for reproduction. To steal a line from Steve King, the GOP congressman from Iowa, the only way they can save their civilization is with “somebody else’s babies.”

Japan’s population shrank by nearly a million between 2010 and 2015, the first absolute decline since census-taking began in the 1920s. On current trend the population will fall to 97 million by the middle of the century. Barely 10% of Japanese will be children. The rest of the population will divide almost evenly between working-age adults and the elderly.

Imagine yourself as a 35-year-old Japanese salary man. You can expect that an ever-larger share of your paycheck will go to the government to fund the pensions and health care of your parents—who, at 70, can reasonably expect to live another 10 or 15 years, and who aren’t likely to vote for politicians promising to strip their entitlements.

Being Japanese, you were raised to make financial sacrifices for your elders, even if it means not having children of your own. Besides, it’s hard to want children with the economy in such bad shape. As Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has noted, lousy demographics mean a lousy economy: The average rate of GDP growth in countries with shrinking working-age populations is only 1.5%. In 2016, Japan’s growth rate was 1%—and that was a relatively good year by recent standards.

What if the government paid you to have babies? Alas, along with millions of your countrymen, you suffer from what the Japanese call “celibacy syndrome” and aren’t interested in sex, never mind procreation. You’re also unhappy: In 2016, Japan ranked 53rd on the U.N.’s World Happiness Report, a notch above Kazakhstan but below El Salvador and Uzbekistan.

So Japan is in trouble, and the government knows it. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has tinkered with formulas to bring in lower-skilled temporary workers for housecleaning and farm jobs, and he has promoted various tax breaks and subsidies to ease the burden of raising children and caring for aging parents.

But whatever their other benefits, “pro-family” policies won’t reverse the demographic trend. Only large-scale immigration can do that, and the Japanese won’t countenance it. The flip side of cohesion is exclusion. The consequence of exclusion is decline.

Which brings us back to Mr. King and the U.S. immigration debates. A decade ago, America’s fertility rate, at 2.12 children for every woman, was just above the replacement rate. That meant there could be modest population growth without immigration. But the fertility rate has since fallen: It’s now below replacement and at an all-time low.

Without immigration, our demographic destiny would become Japanese. But our culture wouldn’t, leaving us with the worst of both worlds: economic stagnation without social stability. Multiethnic America would tear itself to pieces fighting over redistribution rights to the shrinking national pie.

This doesn’t have to be our fate. Though it may be news to Mr. King, immigrants aren’t a threat to American civilization. They are our civilization—bearers of a forward-looking notion of identity based on what people wish to become, not who they once were. Among those immigrants are 30% of all American Nobel Prize winners and the founders of 90 of our Fortune 500 companies—a figure that more than doubles when you include companies founded by the children of immigrants. If immigration means change, it forces dynamism. America is literally unimaginable without it.

Every virtue has its defect and vice versa. The Japanese are in the process of discovering that the social values that once helped launch their development—loyalty, self-sacrifice, harmony—now inhibit it. Americans may need reminding that the culture of openness about which conservatives so often complain is our abiding strength. Openness to different ideas, foreign goods and new people. And their babies—who, whatever else Mr. King might think, are also made in God’s image.

Also true in Russia, Europe and the US where population and workforce declines are masked by legal immigrants or illegals who often take lower paying jobs and/or live off of public assistance. Coverage of a new MN study below. Like Sweden, we are replacing our declining population with people coming for reasons other than the business climate.

With an income tax rate comparable to NY and Calif and double what they charge in Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, not to mention zero state income tax like neighboring South Dakota and Texas and Florida, Minnesota has a net out-flow of people going to or coming from other states. Rich people leave and poor people come, generally speaking.

We have a major inflow of Muslims from east Africa (Somalia) "placed" in Minnesota by the (Obama) state department, as well as 'secondary' immigration where people immigrate and then move to Minnesota for good benefits more so than the weather.

Written by Kim Crockett in Minnesota Budget, Minnesota Economy on May 17, 2017 PrintAs we await the end of the legislative session, Minnesota’s population numbers and growth are in the news, driven by a preliminary report from the Metropolitan Council that estimates current population for the Metro. The report, required by state statute, will set LGA funding for the Metro.

As reported in the Pioneer Press: “Growth in the urban cores of Minneapolis and St. Paul continue to spur the region’s population gains, according to a new report by the Metropolitan Council…The preliminary report, released Tuesday, says the seven-county metro area grew by 191,628 residents between 2010 and 2016. Both St. Paul and Minneapolis saw significant gains: St. Paul’s population grew to 304,442 in 2016… Minneapolis’ population hit 419,952 in 2016.”

I checked in with the state demographer’s office (because I do not trust the Met Council’s methodology or integrity) and confirmed that there has been a notable uptick in the number of residents in the two core cities. Where are people coming from?

Out of the 5.49 million people in the state, about half a million (457,200 as of 2015) were born outside of the United States. The news reports I read did not mention that the only net positive growth as a state is from foreign-born residents.

Or that people from Minnesota are leaving, and people from the U.S. are not moving here, in sufficient numbers to help Minnesota grow.

We recommend reporters visit the State Demographer’s website where one can find detailed reports on just how Minnesota is growing—and how Minnesota is declining, demographically speaking.

A short report called “Ada to Zumbrota” underlines the state’s demographic trends that may cost the state a Congressional district following the 2020 Census. One conclusion from the report: “As deaths are predicted to outnumber births in 2040, migration in Minnesota is going to become increasingly important if Minnesota is to continue growing.”

Here are some highlights and a new graph for you to consider:

While both the U.S.-born population and foreign-born population have grown since 1970, the foreign-born population has swelled more quickly…Minnesota had about 113,000 foreign-born residents in 1990, but that number had more than quadrupled to about 457,200 residents by 2015.

Some of that growth is from refugees settled her by the State Department: the Minnesota Department of Health reports that between 2010 and 2016, Minnesota welcomed about 16,571 refugees. (The Department of Human Services puts the number at 15,808). Since 1979, the State Department has placed approximately 105,000 refugees in Minnesota. (Minnesota is also a favored destination for “secondary” refugees, people who are settled by the State Department in another state but move to Minnesota. Secondary migrants are not in the official count of refugees; we are working on getting those numbers.)

Back to the report:

In terms of percentage change, natural increase (births minus deaths) has historically been slower in Minnesota than the U.S. average. However, Minnesota’s foreign-born percentage change began far outpacing national trends between 1985 and 1995 and continues to do so (in part because our number of immigrants are a small fraction of all those in the nation).

The net change for Minnesota’s foreign-born population between 1990 and 2000 alone was 13% annually. By comparison, population growth due to natural increase in Minnesota was less than 1% annually during those same years. (see Figure 2).

tate trends do not tell us what demographic is driving the growth in the Metro area but it seems reasonable to assume that many foreign-born residents, especially refugees, are making their home in the Metro area at least initially (before perhaps finding housing and hopefully work elsewhere in the state).

What do these trends tell us about our state?

It is no surprise that Minnesota is attractive to immigrants and refugees. Who would not want to live here (no jokes about the weather, please).

But why is Minnesota so unattractive to its own population—or to people from around the U.S.?

The answer is simple: state and local policies are hostile to good jobs and economic growth.